As members of Zillow Group, we like to celebrate the contributions and unique perspectives of the members of our teams. “Engineer Highlight” is a new series of articles and interviews highlighting people, their projects, and their experiences.

Jasmine, how long have you worked at Zillow? Who are you in the office, who are you outside the office?

For the last 2.5 years at Zillow I’ve been doing front-end work, building micro services, and making internal tools. My work time playlist includes a lot of lyrically dense Hip Hop, some Heavy Metal, and a bit of Grunge.

I consider myself a nerd and I have a lot of geeky friends. With that said I’m not a “typical geek” – if there is such a thing. I don’t play ping-pong. I rarely play video games. I’ve never played D&D.

My interests include wine, cooking, baking, street & digital art, ocean side beaches, fashion and UX design (Big surprise – I’m from California). My Netflix and Hulu queues are stuffed with documentaries, western animated shows, and anime series. When I open a new tab in Chrome TVTropes and RiffTrax appear under the Google search bar.

After work, I frequently go to one my favorite restaurants and get some sketching done on my Galaxy Note. If I’m in the mood I exchange stories with strangers and wait staff.

What’s an example of a project or problem you’ve worked on?

I’ve worked on so many projects: “zModernize”, “Agent Finder”, “Men in Black”, and “Carmen Zandiego” the code names go on.

For this answer I will focus on “Check you service before you wreck your service” or CheckWreck project.

When I started working for Zillow, writing unit tests and selenium tests was straightforward. The same could not be said for service level integration testing. Because integration testing was so difficult, developers just didn’t have the time to write them. The CheckWreck project created tools that made writing integration tests easy and a UI for running and tracking test results.

I really liked that project because it allowed me to dip my toes into multiple roles. I got to play UI Designer, UX researcher, Product Manager, and my usual role of Front End developer. I also won prize for it #WinningIsFun.

How would you describe Zillow culture, people, environment, and life balance?

Software Engineers like working at Zillow (GlassDoor reviews). The proof is in Zillow’s retention rates and Glassdoor ratings.

Tech @ Zillow is interesting because it’s growing from a large company to a very large company. We are trying to improve our release process, move to micro service architecture, and integrate the other Zillow Group brands. How we navigate these growing pains over the next couple of years will be very important for Zillow’s future.

As for the people, Zillow is also a highly collaborative environment. More on that later.

In terms of demographics, Zillow has a surprising number of mothers and fathers in its tech org. Most of the tech employees are (dare I say it) Millennials but not everyone is. Like most tech companies Zillow is still working on its diversity.

One thing that has surprised me is that Zillow’s upper management. In every company wide meeting, you as an employee can ask the executives an anonymous question via Slido. If your question gets enough upvotes from other employees, the executives have to answer it. From what I can tell, that’s not typical and I wish it was.

What makes Zillow different from other places you’ve worked?

Based on my tech friends’ 2^nd hand experiences and my experiences, I can say that Zillow is different. That came to light during the CheckWreck project.

Zillow thrice-annual Hackweek lets employees work on what ever they want. This is not the case at many companies that have a very limited hackweek or no hackweek at all.

Because Zillow’s Velocity team is responsible for making Zillow #MoveFastThinkBig, my team could get advice on how best to build CheckWreck. What started as a project to support python flask services grew into a group of tools that could be used in any service regardless of language.

Unlike some companies, Zillowites are willing to make time for other Zillowites. When I wanted design feedback on an internal tool that no executive knew about, I could find a designer that wasn’t too busy or too important to help me.

At Zillow, the design team invites software engineers to watch its UX testing. Many large companies avoid such cross-pollination. Because I had gone to several of those presentations, I knew that I could use usability testing to assess the CheckWreck UI design.

Because Zillow employees are very collaborative, I was able to get over a dozen people to be usability test subjects. This was in spite of the fact that I was competing with these employees for the same Hackweek prize.

What I’m getting at is that many tech companies place a lot of emphasis on the talent of the individual whereas Zillow believes in the wisdom of the whole. IMHO this difference in philosophy produces better results. Imperfect metric as it is, my code output is probably 3+ times higher here than at any previous job.

In this industry, engineers and are in high demand. What advice would you give for someone who is looking?

I’ve only been in the industry for 5-ish years so this advice is more for the newbies. I’ll try to avoid the platitudes.

Before the job: Get code interview handbooks and try to solve EVERY problem. In my experience, companies reject most engineers because they lack technical skills or are over confident in the skills they have.

During the interview: Ask hard-hitting questions that will make you interviewer sweat little. Ask them about how they handle project failure, the state of their test automation, the pervasiveness of legacy code, and how they interact with their designers and other teams. Not only will you be better remembered for asking the hard questions, you will get more candid answers.

After the offer: Try to meet as many of your prospective coworkers before they are your coworkers. Be skeptical of any company able but not willing to do this.

Before you accept: If you want to be happy, choose people you can work well with over sexy, flashy products. I know more than 1 software engineer that got to work on their dream product only quit one miserable year because of the people. Even if you only care about the product, choosing bad people is not the way to go. More often than you think, great products become front-page news disasters because workers couldn’t work together. More often than you realize mediocre products become great products because the great people working on them.

After you’re there: Don’t be afraid to switch positions, roles, or even companies. No job is fun all the time but if you are truly unhappy, it’s time for a change. If your not willing to leave a job you hate you will never find the job you love.

Photo Credit: Justin Farris